Hospitals Opt to Manufacture Drugs

Years over, hospital administrators have expressed their dissatisfaction with the scarcity of essential drugs such as heart medicine. Besides the medicines being inaccessible, their prices are way high because the investors have interfered with the market. It is such frustrations that have seen several large hospital systems coming together to tackle this problem. They intend to get into the drug business. Many have interpreted the move as just a preliminary. The chief executive officer of Intermountain Healthcare, Dr. Marc Harrison says that they intend to outdo the bad guys. The efforts to supersede investors that make healthcare unaffordable has been spearheaded by the nonprofit Salt Lake City hospital. The hospitals plan to fix the problems that have existed in a couple of years.

The Intermountain executives were careful not to mention the kind of drugs they intend to make. It is however clear that hospitals have experienced the shortage of morphine while the prices of products such as Nitropress for the heart have seen its prices shoot at once. Hospitals have been highly criticized for allegedly overcharging their services. Major hospitals such as Ascension which is recognized across the county as the largest nonprofit hospital group intends to come up with a company that will be issuing some generic drugs to the hospitals. In total, about 300 hospitals have confirmed their involvement in the group while others are expected to join anytime. Dr. Harrison was quick to point out that the group will only focus on areas that are most affected and not the entire drug industry.

What the hospital group mainly intend to do is challenging the shareholders who have invested heavily in particular markets, as they buy monopolies of both old and off-patent drugs then raise the prices. The actions of the investors have called for federal investigations. An excellent example of these investors is Martin Shkreli who increased the cost of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750. Over the past 10 years, hospitals have had to deal with the shortage of essential drugs such as injectable morphine. The situation is worsened by the fact that only a company or two manufactures these drugs. The executives from Intermountain said that they were not willing to give any details regarding the project. They say that revealing such vital information would make their competitors drastically drop the prices and later raise them. Intermountain intend to focus on drugs whose prizes have sharply rise.